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3.2 Easter as a Germanic Heathen festival
The Easter festival's name in the English and German languages, and much of the symbolism now commonly associated with Easter, derive from Eostre, an alleged Germanic pagan fertility goddess, if a remark by the 8th century English historian the Venerable Bede to that effect is to be believed. Her primary festival, according to Bede, fell in the spring during her month, Eostremonat. According to the Bede,the word "Easter" is derived from the Old Norse Ostara or Eostre, a festival of spring at the vernal equinox, March 21, when nature is in resurrection after winter, hence, the symbolism of rabbits, notable for their fecundity, and the eggs, colored like rays of the returning sun and the aurora borealis. The Easter Bunny is clearly a Western European tradition. Some historians assume that Bede falsely concluded the existence of goddess Eostre from the unquestionably real month name Eostremonat, as any references to such a goddess from other Germanic sources are missing. Children roll easter eggs in England and America. They hunt the many-colored Easter eggs, brought by the Easter Bunny. Hidden in the play are, it has been argued, the vestiges of a fertility rite, the eggs and the rabbit both symbolizing fertility. (A rabbit, furthermore, was sometimes said to be the escort of the goddess, but there are no pre- 19th century sources for this.)
There is much evidence that Easter celebrations existed in parts of Christendom which were unlikely to have been influenced by Germanic heathenry, under names deriving from "Pesach" such as Paschal, rather than "Eostre" variants. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 agreed that Easter should be celebrated on the same day throughout the church. There are extant homilies such as St John Chrysostom's Easter Homily , written in the 5th century, in Constantinople; or the Pascha Homily of Bishop Melito of Sardis, in the 2nd century, which refer to Easter. It is possible that, as the Germanic peoples were Christianized, the Christian Paschal celebrations which had developed in non-Germanic areas merged with and assimilated features from the heathen Eostre celebrations which took place at about the same time of the year in the Germanic countries, a merger that would have been eased by the resurrection/rebirth themes common to both.
Most of the symbols now attached to Christmas and Halloween are similarly said to be derived from the well-attested pre-Christian northern European pagan holidays of Yule and Samhain, although this is not universally accepted. According to this theory, Christian missionaries arriving in northern Europe found that, rather than trying to suppress popular and established pagan feasts, it was easier to simply provide a Christian reinterpretation of the holiday, and allow the various customs and symbols associated with the holiday to continue largely unchanged.
Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastic History of the English People") contains a letter from Pope Gregory I to Saint Mellitus, who was then on his way to England to conduct missionary work among the heathen Anglo-Saxons. The Pope suggests that converting heathens is easier if they are allowed to retain the outward forms of their traditional pagan practices and traditions, while recasting those traditions spiritually towards the one true God instead of to their pagan gods (whom the Pope refers to as "devils"), "to the end that, whilst some gratifications are outwardly permitted them, they may the more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace of God". [3] The Pope sanctions such conversion tactics as Biblicly acceptable, pointing out that God did much the same thing with the ancient Israelites and their pagan sacrifices.
